Zoë radio

adunis

Greetings other Zoë owners,
Quick question,
How crap is your radio reception ?
Or is my one just special ?

Gile_na_gile

2017 ZE40. Radio system is excellent in terms of reception and sound quality. Father has a ZE50. Also good, but no AM radio option. Anyone managed to get that back? It is probably just dropped in the software.

UID0

No problems with radio reception here.

AM is being gotten rid of in a lot of electric vehicles as the motor/inverter/control electronics emit frequencies in the AM range and interfere with reception.

Gile_na_gile

More likely it is because it is considered obsolete, as it was on older Zoes, but some people still want to listen to overseas radio via AM instead of via smartphone.

darrenheaphy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119493694#Comment_119493694

No way, really? I was Googling it but couldn't find anything as the manual refers to AM radio but the option isn't available. Does that mean it's been removed or is there some complex route via Settings to activate AM radio?

Glaceon

@Zechariah Drab Showboat was able to re-enable AM on an EV, not sure what one though.

The BMW i3 has AM radio ( disabled by software ) or at least my 2017 did but that's no guarantee that any other model or version will have it.

AM was disabled by BMW as the grounding is so poor in the i3 due to having no metal/aluminium in the body or chassis. I enabled it and as soon as the motor spun up it wiped it completely out but once stopped it was actually quite good and I was really surprised to find it actually had the 49M Shortwave band too !

The Nissan leaf had Am but the quality on Am was not very good as is typical of any modern AM radio.

The LW/MW radio in our 2015 Outlander is really good. We drove it to Wales up to Birmingham and back listening to LW252, cracking signal it was too considering it's running at half the power or less.

AM is considered Obsolete in the eyes of some but I believe our reliance on the internet for practically everything today is a mistake.

When you're driving in some areas there is no or poor internet and streaming can be impossible to downright irritating where AM simply works, FM too.

I think worst of all is not allowing People to have the AM radio in a car when it's so cheap is just wrong, allowing corporations to dictate what way we get our music, news etc it's just not right.

Anyway, the Zoe may or may not have AM disabled by software I don't know, a lot of radios today have LW/MW/FM built into the same chip and in some cases Shortwave because it's just so cheap it wouldn't be worth their time or effort not to include these different modes but for car companies not to include it because "they" think it's obsolete and decide we shouldn't have it is just plane wrong. Interference is another matter, in the Leaf ( 2015 ) it worked but the filters were very narrow causing the audio to be muffled. The i3 caused too much interference, there was no metal for grounding.

I've no doubt though they'll just say na, can't do it too much interference.